Quo me rapis?

“Quo me, Rapis?” My first guess at this latin while reading the passage written from Dr. Maturin’s viewpoint in The Far Side of the World by Parrick O’Brian was:

“Am I drunk?”

Not quite. Here’s the passage, Aubrey and Maturin have been invited to celebrate the granting of a royal title to the fleet admiral:

‘What delightful wine,’ observed Stephen to nobody in particular. ‘But it is by no means innocent,’ he added, slowly drinking the rest of the glass. Because of the total confusion in the frigate he had had no breakfast apart from a cup of coffee; the packet of sandwiches and the flask of cold negus that he had forgotten to take up the Rock lay in his cabin…his usual dinner time was two hours earlier than this; the latter part of his morning had been intensely frustrating, hot, dusty and hurried; and so far he had eaten nothing but crumb of bread: he felt the effect of the wine well before his glass was emptied – a very slight swimming in his head, the faint birth of a certain benignity, a willingness to be pleased with his company. ‘Quo me rapis?’ he murmured. Sure it destroys one’s sense of free will. Jove made Hector bold and timid, timid and bold by turn so there was no personal merit in his heroism, no shame in his running away. From a misanthrope Bacchus makes me sociable…Yet on the other hand I have already bowed and smiled; I had performed at least the motions of complaisancy; and how have I not observed that imitation begets the reality.’

Have you ever seen so many semicolons?

“…a willingness to be pleased with his company.” In the clipped vernacular of today wouldn’t that translate to buzz?

Searching so the meaning of Quo me rapis?  it was only fitting that I find the answer on a site dedicated to O’Brian. It’s from Horace’s Odes. In a roundabout way my first guess was near correct. Am I ravished, or Where, Bacchus, are you carrying me off to? 

And again with the negus. Maybe we can get our local Wine & Spirits Shop to stock some.

The Ionian Mission

Every once is a while the harmonic convergence of cultural consumption merges to form, well, a blog post. Two and you call it coincidence. Three is rarer, and worth noting. Call it blogorhythm.

We just finished the next work in our campaign to read all of the Patrick O’Brian Age of Sail masterpieces, The Ionian Mission. Captain Jack Aubrey’s ship is skirting the coast of Greece and he writes in his serial letter home that his daughters should be asked to find Epirus on the map. What are the odds, that the name for an ancient and obscure Greek province should appear in two consecutive modes of media consumption, a computer game and a historical novel?!

And further, Aubrey then advises that his son George should also be led to learn about the deeds of Pyrrhus, “‘for it would be a great shame, was George to be found ignorant of Pyrrhus when he grew up.’”

The next sentence O’Brian writes is a thought that has likely crossed every father’s mind: “Jack had never been a hypocrite until he became a father, and even now it did not come easy.”

Yes.

And while we’re about it, earlier in the book O’Brian, via Doctor Maturin, a smoker, dashes off what may be the most eloquent praise of tobacco ever written. In his cabin, after a huge breakfast “in the Naval fashion” Aubrey invites Maturin, who’s about to embark on a risky mission, to smoke:

“If you have finished Stephen, pray smoke away. I am sure you bought some of your best mundungus in Mahon.”

“If you are sure you really do not find it disagreeable,” said Stephen, instantly feeling in his pockets, “I believe I may. For me tobacco is the crown of the meal, the best opening to a day, a great enhancer of the quality of life. The crackle and yield of this little paper cylinder,” he said, holding it up, “gives me a sensual pleasure whose deeper origins I blush to contemplate, while the slow combustion of the whole yields a gratification that I should not readily abandon even if it did me harm, which it does not. Far from it. On the contrary, tobacco purges the mind of its gross humors, sharpens the wits, renders the judicious smoker sprightly and vivacious. And soon I shall need all my sprightliness and vivacity.”

Negus

In The Surgeon’s Mate, a funny spot where Maturin has won all the money from Jagiello, the Lithuanian cavalry officer, at cards and finds himself explaining their nautical navigation situation so expertly – “…or abaft as we say…” then a soaking Aubrey storms in for a cup of negus. Negus, this recipe adds brandy but spice some ruby port wine with a little nutmeg and a little lemon and there you go.

The Surgeon’s Mate

The Patrick O’Brian novels are an unparalleled mix of Age of Sail detail, insights into pre-Victorian anglophonics and keen characterizations but they also achieve their effect in many small ways, at times overshadowed by the more obvious of their merits.

One such is the minute attention to food, drink and other substances. Alcohol is prominent, both on-board and off, and tobacco is not only widely used, it’s practically celebrated, and at times prescribed by our co-hero, Doctor Maturin.

Anyone who’s read the books will know the characters in the excerpts below. If you’ve seen the movie only, excellent as it is, you’ll have gotten a mere fraction of the portraits of these men, and a small fraction at that, and absolutely none of the women. These excerpts from this, the sixth book in the series, will give scant background but if you’re sensitive to even the tiniest of spoilers, you’d better stop here and start reading the books, before they’re banned for promoting tobacco use.

This first snippet is the part of the aftermath from the ending of the previous work (Desolation Island.) Here Maturin considers Diane Villiers, who has dealt him some emotional blows in the past, she having lately spent some time among the ruffians of the New World (and as the mistress of one): 

Page 36: “His pain was not the piercing thrust of jealousy but rather a certain grief at hearing her say something crass. He had always taken it for granted that whatever Diana might actually do, her tact was infallible and that she could not, without intending it, say anything that would give offense. Perhaps he had been mistaken: or perhaps this long stay in America, living only among the loose, expensive set of Johnson’s friends, together with her distress, had coarsened her for the time, just as it had given her a hint of colonial accent and a taste for bourbon and tobacco…as refuge in coarseness, as it were.”

Yeah! Bourbon and tobacco. Refuge in coarseness. Never thought of them like that. Perhaps because to many of us New Worlders, coarseness would be a step up.

And later Captain Aubrey, in Halifax attending a ball for the Royal Navy’s first naval victory of the War of 1812, the Shannon’s taking of the Chesapeake, has had his wind spilled by disappointment: by no letters from his wife, Sophie; by the news from a fellow ball-goer that he had recently danced with Sophie at a ball in England; and by the loss of an assignment because he’d been away so long (recounted, again, in the previous book.) Things begin to look up when a young lady takes an interest, and after one of his former crewmen promises to fix him something with more of a kick than the “thin fizzy stuff” officially available to the party-goers, something more familiar to him from years aboard ship…grog. Aubrey, a gifted sailor, commander and fighter on a ship, can barely make his way on land, whether it be with finances, navy department politics or romantic affairs, and tends to drift toward the rocks in all these areas, especially after he’s had a few. Here he’s engaged in some verbal sparring with an obnoxious Army officer over the attentions of a young lady when the confrontation comes to an end, and Jack begins to feel a little more…irrigated. 

Page 60: “Miss Smith’s reappearance checked any retort that might have been forming in Jack’s mind: the music began again, and as he led her into the dance he observed that it was strange how differently wine took different men – some grew glum and fault-finding, some quarrelsome or tearful; for his part he found it did not affect him at all, except perhaps to make him like people rather more, and to make the world seem a cheerful place. ‘Not that it could be much more cheerful than it is already,’ he added, smiling at the throng, where the greenbacked girl, dancing away totally unconscious of her betrayal, was adding much to the gaiety of nations.”

Resonates, eh? I’ve known maudlin and argumentative and hypercritical drunks, but Aubrey’s “no-affect” affect sounds familiar as well. Mm hm. That what-a-wonderful-world feeling, yep, that’s exactly how alcohol doesn’t affect me. Every time.

BTW: And the girl was “greenbacked” because a sudden rain storm had chased those outside in the shrubbery back inside, perhaps before they’d has a chance to be brushed off by their companions.